Opinion: Note to Clinton: Ditch the dialect, lose the laugh

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Forget, for the moment, the brouhaha over Hillary Clinton’s ha ha’s. Rudy Guiliani today opted to poke fun at an earlier flap -- the penchant Clinton showed for lapsing into a Southern twang (captured on YouTube here and here).

Guiliani spent part of his morning pressing the flesh at a diner in Manchester, N.H., but, as is increasingly his wont, what he really wanted to do was focus his fire on Clinton. Speaking to reporters outside the eatery, including The Times’ Michael Finnegan, he mocked Clinton for her proposal to provide $5,000 education bonds for children. He invoked one of the patron saints of landslide losers, saying: ‘The last presidential candidate to recommend such a thing was George McGovern’ (the 1972 Democratic nominee famously floated, and then let die, a plan to provide every American $1,000 a year).

He worked in a reference to the fight over immigration, asking: ‘Will it include the children of illegals, particularly those who are citizens if they’re born here in the United States?’

He went on to criticize Clinton’s healthcare proposal. And then, touting what he refers to as his ‘authenticity,’ he said, ‘I don’t have an accent for different parts of the country. There’s just one me.’

Clinton long ago ....

made light of that particular tempest in a teapot. ‘I think America is ready for a multilingual president,’ she said during an April stop in South Carolina.

Now, she similarly is trying to defuse the commotion over her distinctive laugh (the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has devoted two columns to it -- here and here).

The Clinton cackle, which gained wide attention following her recent appearances on a spate of Sunday morning talk shows, unquestionably is something short of melodic. Today, she took note of the stir that revelation has produced.

The Times’ Peter Nicholas reports that as Clinton accepted an endorsement from the American Federation of Teachers, she cracked: “I don’t want to go on too much longer because it might cause me to laugh, and then heaven knows what we’d hear about for the next week or two.’’

At that, it was the audience who guffawed.

Clinton pressed on. “You’ve got to have a sense of humor in this business.’’

-- Don Frederick